Losing With LIBOR: One Trader's Story : Planet MoneyThe scandal over interest-rate manipulation seems dry until you consider what happened to Dan Sullivan. He may have lost a million dollars as a result — and he's just one of many who say they've been harmed

We've been reporting on the LIBOR rate fixing scandal. Some of the biggest banks in the world have been accused of manipulating a key global interest rate.

Well, now to a story about how manipulation on such a large scale impacted one person. David Kestenbaum of NPR's Planet Money introduces us to a man who says the manipulation of LIBOR cost him a million dollars in just 24 hours.

DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: Dan Sullivan had this morning routine. He'd get up at 5:00 a.m. and go to work and, when he got there, he'd guzzle a large cup of coffee because the place he was headed next, you weren't allowed to bring coffee and you really had to be sharp. He was headed to a trading floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

DAN SULLIVAN: I traded for Sullivan Crauth Trading, which is me, my brother and one other guy.

KESTENBAUM: They wore blue and green trading jackets and shouted stuff like this.

SULLIVAN: Hey, on three and a half bid. Hey, John, John, three and a half bid. Three and a half bid on 500.

KESTENBAUM: Dan wasn't trading cotton or soybeans. He was in a market you've probably never heard of but that's arguably much bigger. He was buying and selling derivatives based on that interest rate, LIBOR, the big banks have been accused of manipulating. People buy these derivatives for lots of reasons, but for what happened next, all you need to know is that, on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 - Dan remembers the date - he was holding some derivatives that amounted to a lottery ticket, a small bet that would pay off big if something crazy happened with LIBOR. And something crazy did happen.

SULLIVAN: Sunday afternoon, I was at my brother's house watching the White Sox game and it started coming through, you know, on our phones. We got texts from people, hey, Lehman's going under. Lehman's going under.

KESTENBAUM: Lehman Brothers, the giant investment bank, was about to go bankrupt. This was a cataclysmic event. Dan's eyes got wide. He started doing the math on a piece of paper and realized he might make a million dollars the next morning when the new LIBOR number came out. It was a total no-brainer that interest rates were going to skyrocket, he thought.

LIBOR is an average of what big banks say they can borrow money at and a major bank was collapsing.

SULLIVAN: They're supposed to be, you know, reporting what other banks will lend them money at and, if I were a bank, I wouldn't lend money to another bank at all that Monday. I mean, LIBOR should have almost been undefined on Monday morning because it should have been so high.

KESTENBAUM: But Monday morning arrived. At 6:00 a.m., the new LIBOR number came out and it was unchanged as if nothing had happened. One of the biggest bank failures in history had just occurred and you would never have known by looking at LIBOR.

For Dan, his lottery ticket that had looked like a big winner - it was worthless.

SULLIVAN: I was just dumbfounded that morning. You know, I was like a deer in headlights, like I can't believe what happened and then it was only with hindsight that it started to become clear that they had just lied about it.

KESTENBAUM: Now that internal emails have come out with employees at Barclays Bank talking quite openly about setting LIBOR for their own benefit, Dan says it's like salt in the wound.

SULLIVAN: In hindsight, I wish I had walked out that day and just never come back. After that, it's a frustrating experience to feel like you're just getting stolen from all the time.

KESTENBAUM: Dan is not trading anymore. He's decided to move on. But there are lots of Dans out there and many of them are suing. They say they've lost a lot more than Dan did. There are huge pension funds and hedge funds and city governments that bought those derivatives. A war on the courts seems to be brewing.

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